Pingtime: A trippy, augmented reality ping pong table

When we were younger, we all went through a phase where we get really into ping pong. You can’t deny it happened to you, because it happens to all of us. If you’re not yet old enough to have experienced this, you’re now aware what your future holds. That phase normally dies out quickly — usually right after you purchase your own ping pong table because that’s how into the game you got. Sadly, the table just sits there, fulfilling its final destiny of being used as a regular table. Now, if that table were Pingtime, an augmented reality ping pong table that can track both the ball and paddles and create cool, trippy light shows of the movement in real-time, then maybe you would’ve kept practicing your trick serve.

Basically, Pingtime is the cosmic bowling of ping pong.

Created for the 2013 Rokolectiv Festival, the team of Sergiu Doroftei, Silviu Badea, Ion Cotenescu, and Bogdan Susma, used programming language VVVV — not to be confused with the Terry Cavanagh game — in order to bring Pingtime to life. The table also belongs to the Creator’s Project, a joint program between Intel and VICE that spawns a plethora of projects that attempt to combine technology with art.

Everything is equipped with sensors, and the table then projects different colors and patterns of light as the paddles swing over the table, and as the ball flies over — as well as hits — the surface. You basically have to be able to see in the dark (although the ball appears to be lit up faintly) in order to get a truly trippy effect, but hey, we’re all just having a casual, fun game of augmented reality ping pong to begin with, right?